UCLA In the News April 19, 2018

We’ve known for a while that sitting for long stretches of every day has myriad health consequences, like a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes, that culminate in a higher mortality rate. But now a new study has found that sitting is also bad for your brain. And it might be the case that lots of exercise is not enough to save you if you’re a couch potato. A study published last week, conducted by Dr. Prabha Siddarth at UCLA, showed that sedentary behavior is associated with reduced thickness of the medial temporal lobe, which contains the hippocampus, a brain region that is critical to learning and memory.

Advocates for universal health care aren’t giving up, though some have shifted their strategy to moving piecemeal toward universal healthcare in lieu of a massive single-payer bill. “There are individual steps that we can still take to expand coverage to various populations that are falling through the cracks,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Mom developed an interest in heritage-language education after noticing an increasing number of students in her UCLA classes whose parents were Russian. These students were annoying their classmates because they spoke the language so effortlessly. Many instructors saw heritage speakers as disruptive nuisances who were just after easy grades, but Mom said, “If they come for an easy grade and that’s what we give them, it’s our fault, not theirs.”

A tunnel diameter of 12 feet, about half as wide as the typical Metro subway tunnel, would bring the project’s total area just under the CEQA exemption size limit. “The project almost seems tailor-made to shoehorn in,” said Juan Matute, a UCLA lecturer in urban planning. “I never in my wildest dreams expected that anyone would propose to use this exemption for this project.”

“This is just another example of how as a black person in America your very existence is questioned and your ability to move freely throughout the world is really policed,” says Evelyn Carter, a UCLA social psychologist who studies the impact of bias on culture.

Amander Clark of the University of California, Los Angeles, says her goal is to aid basic research into why some people are infertile. She acknowledges the technique might itself be used to treat some infertility, particularly in young people made sterile by cancer treatments. (Also: KABC-TV)

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We need to much more finely tune the instruments that we use to get the right kind of housing and in the right places, and that means particularly better geographical targeting of these measures and much more attention to affordability and inclusiveness,” said UCLA’s Michael Storper. (Approx. 2:40 mark)